Slashdot, SourceForge, FreeCode sold to jobs site company

Dice Holdings buys them for $20 million from Geeknet

Slashdot has been sold again. Dice Holdings, the company behind the Dice.com career site, announced today that it had purchased Slashdot, as well as the SourceForge and FreeCode websites, from Geeknet for $20 million in cash. According to a statement from Geeknet—the company formerly known as SourceForge, VA Software, and VA Linux—the sale price was approximately equal to what the three sites have brought in over the last year.

In 1999, Slashdot founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda sold the site to Andover.net for $1.5 million in cash and $7 million in stock. Andover merged with VA Linux less than a year later. In 2005, Om Malik estimated the value of Slashdot at $150 million. But since then, revenue for the sites has remained relatively flat, while the ThinkGeek retail site has become an increasingly larger piece of the company's business as the company continues to operate at a loss. Malda left Slashdot for good in August of 2011, and now is Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large for the Washington Post's WaPo Labs.

Geeknet Chairman Ken Langone said in the statement that with the shedding of Slashdot and the rest of what originally made up SourceForge Inc., "we will now focus our full attention on growing ThinkGeek."

They should have just turned into a troll run humorous fake news website. The fact that they continually tried to turn it into something other than the trollfest it was intended to be was a mistake. The comment trolls and first post spam were probably the best part of the site.

When something has momentum don't try to "fix it."

Edit: Thanks to its allowance for open anonymous commenting Slashdot was almost like a nerdy original version of /b/. Everyone remember the "slashdot effect"?

They should have just turned into a troll run humorous fake news website. The fact that they continually tried to turn it into something other than the trollfest it was intended to be was a mistake. The comment trolls and first post spam were probably the best part of the site.

When something has momentum don't try to "fix it."

Edit: Thanks to its allowance for open anonymous commenting Slashdot was almost like a nerdy original version of /b/. Everyone remember the "slashdot effect"?

Most of the web sites I see /. linking to are reputable. Ars is one of those common web sites that I see, but I guess that says a lot of what you think about Ars.

They should have just turned into a troll run humorous fake news website. The fact that they continually tried to turn it into something other than the trollfest it was intended to be was a mistake. The comment trolls and first post spam were probably the best part of the site.

Back in the day, Slashdot was reputable, at least, as reputable as anything else on the net at the time. Despite its obvious flaws, it really was the pioneer for how news sites work now (regular posts, linking content, comments as much of a draw as the article, etc).

They should have just turned into a troll run humorous fake news website. The fact that they continually tried to turn it into something other than the trollfest it was intended to be was a mistake. The comment trolls and first post spam were probably the best part of the site.

Back in the day, Slashdot was reputable, at least, as reputable as anything else on the net at the time. Despite its obvious flaws, it really was the pioneer for how news sites work now (regular posts, linking content, comments as much of a draw as the article, etc).

That said, I haven't actually gone there in years.

Fake news site was the wrong way to put it, I should say opinion/editorial style site rather than just posting up news links. That's a failing business model because Google can do a better job aggregating stories than they can.

The thing that made slashdot great was the mass of discussion on the stories. As they tried to lock down the comment system and eliminate the "troll element" they were actually just getting rid of a lot of the site's personality. I haven't followed slashdot in years, though I have occasionally gone there on a lark. I've found it to be nothing like the compelling spirited site it once was.

The first post spam, the copy paste trolls, they weren't relevant to the stories, but they established slashdot's own culture. You don't make something better by removing its culture, and that's basically what's been done from what I can tell.

Like other I've found Ars via /. and I've found them to be complimentary. Ars has really great original content where /. simply points you to it.

Sad to say, /. is one of my homepages in Chrome and I still saw the announcement first on Ars.

It wasn't bad as an aggregator in terms of the links, but the commentary by the editors and the majority of the reader comments were crap, because the editors would misread the article (deliberately or on purpose) and then 90% of the comments would be knee jerk reactions and comments saying "OMG the editor got it completely wrong." And all those comments means extra clicks meaning more ad impressions meaning that it was never going to get better because the incentive was to create controversy that wasn't there to get the impressions.

Doesn't that seem extremely odd? You usually sell a business for some multiple of current earnings... Geeknet would have made the same amount of money sitting on the sites for a year vs selling them, presumably doubling their money in year two.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that Geeknet thinks the sites are going to bring in much less money over the next year or two and wants to cash out now, they are extremely incompetent, or they are in such bad financial shape that they had to take whatever they could get in short order.

Slashdot died a long long time ago....Everyone remember the "slashdot effect"?

When I saw the title of this article, I thought to myself, "Slash what???" Pity they couldn't maintain the momentum and keep it relevant. The /. effect used to be a great moment of pride for a site or blog post. Then came the Digg effect and others. It's a pity that sites that had some potential to become thriving icons just died without a lot of people noticing (IMO).

I like Ars a lot more than Slashdot. Still read slashdot mostly out of habit

Same here. The story summaries are always inaccurate and inflammatory, the discussions usually devolve into garbage, and I know that spending too much time on slashdot made me more judgmental than I used to be. But I still go there out of habit. Damn skinner box.

932096 here, though I ACd since 2000. It was already basically dead, but I am sad to hear about what is most likely the death of the first truly non-corporate driven IT news site, before /. all we had was stuff like PC mag and ZDnet. Heck, i think it's even older than Tom's hardware...

Doesn't that seem extremely odd? You usually sell a business for some multiple of current earnings... Geeknet would have made the same amount of money sitting on the sites for a year vs selling them, presumably doubling their money in year two.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that Geeknet thinks the sites are going to bring in much less money over the next year or two and wants to cash out now, they are extremely incompetent, or they are in such bad financial shape that they had to take whatever they could get in short order.

Business people want their businesses to grow as fast as possible, and to be as profitable as possible. So they unload parts that aren't growing that much, and whose profits are slim. What's left has better performance.

In the long run, it may not work. Look to Kodak. They were pretty much forced to shed Eastman Chemical, and their material and fabrics division, I forget what it was called, way back before digital came in. Photography was growing much faster. Now, they are in bankruptcy hearings where they wouldn't be if they had retained those slowly growing, but reliable businesses.

As much as I can sort of understand the significance of Slashdot's contribution to how news is handled on the Net and people's involvement in its community...Isn't SourceForge far more concerning here? It supplies users with software tools for free and can help attract developers to contribute to some interesting projects. News is great, but actual tools and advertisements of projects developing even better tools seems far more important.

Not to say I'm not a bit disappointed that Slashdot may be fading out (even more?) as a loss of another geek/tech news source is never that good, but I know I'd be more frustrated if SourceForge ever disappeared.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.